Issue 10: Winter 2022
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A song for Big Bay
[PHOTO ESSAY] Dinner when it’s cooked / breakfast when it’s shucked / surfing, food beneath our boards / all of Big Blue’s rewards / spend all our time living / no need to be forgiven / we exist in nature’s rhythm. Awarua Bay, also known as Big Bay, spans eight kilometres along the southwest coast…
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Rationalise this
Because we’re nothing but a cross between Caligula and monkeys wearing pants. THESE DAYS, EVERYONE’S AN ENVIRONMENTALIST. TO BE OTHERWISE IS TO RISK BECOMING A SOCIAL EXILE OR HAVING YOUR BUSINESS BOYCOTTED. OUR SOCIAL CHANNELS MAKE US ALL SEEM LIKE THE LOVE CHILDREN OF JANE GOODALL AND DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. MESSAGING CORRECT, BRANDING ON POINT. It…
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Anytime Cornbread Recipe
It’s bread, but not as you know it. Cornbread is easy, fast, delicious, healthy(ish), and with a slight change of ingredients can be a tasty addition to almost any meal. For dinner, it can be served with soups, Mexican or as a side for your meat and veg. For lunch, use it as the bun…
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Got your back
From sheepskin to gabardine to Gore-Tex, Nick Ainge-Roy charts the evolution of the performance jacket. ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1991, TWO GERMAN TOURISTS, ERIKA AND HELMUT SIMON, CAME ACROSS A BODY ON THE EAST RIDGE OF THE FINEILSPITZE IN THE ÖTZAL ALPS NEAR THE AUSTRIAN-ITALIAN BORDER. The wizened mass looked more like a hunk of gnarled,…
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The terrible catastrophe of 1863
Whitney Thurlow revisits a notorious avalanche. In Avalanche Accidents in Aotearoa, the only scholarly history of avalanches in New Zealand, one event stands out. It was August of 1963, and 50 prospectors were camped at the head of the Serpentine Gully, near Dunstan, when a “very heavy snowfall” hit the Main Divide of the Southern…
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Fishing with the poet
Writer and fisher Dougal Rillstone takes to the Mataura River with the acclaimed New Zealand poet Kevin Ireland. THE POET TRAVELS FROM DEVONPORT TO THE FAR SOUTH OF NEW ZEALAND A COUPLE OF TIMES A YEAR, TO FLY-FISH FOR TROUT AND CATCH UP WITH OLD FRIENDS. He says he is in his eighty-eighth year, but…
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Repo Raupo
On wetlands and the cost of standing up for the environment in a small rural community. For seven years I gave the responsibility for the land under my stewardship and care to a local farmer. Twenty acres of land so sodden and stony the last owner had named it Bastard Flats. The farmer owns 20,000…
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All roads lead to snow
The 1964 guide to the ski roads of the South Island. WE HAVE TO DRIVE TO THE SNOWLINE HERE, UNLIKE IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD, AND THE ROAD UP TO ANY NEW ZEALAND SKI FIELD IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF ITS FOUNDING STORY. Early paths carved by bulldozers, winches and good keen humans opened…
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Sparkles like the day it went in
In search of the General Grant’s gold. There was no raging storm when a lookout on the General Grant sighted Disappointment Island. The evening of Sunday, May 13, 1866 was almost completely still. There was a dense fog. At 10.30pm, Captain William Loughlin ordered all hands to “square the yard” — set the sails so…